Five for Friday (07.07.2017)

Five for Friday is a weekly feature to give a brief roundup of our top five stories from the week that you might have missed. Think we left anything out? Let us know your favourite stories of the week by pinging us a tweet @pcr_online.

AMD launched its Ryzen processors earlier this year to great acclaim and it would appear that's being reflected in sales as the company made its largest quarterly share gain in history.

According to benchmarking experts PassMark, AMD gained 10.4 per cent in the second quarter, taking it to 31 per cent of the market – up from its 20.6 per cent market share in the previous quarter. By contrast. Intel saw its market share drop to a still very impressive 69 per cent to show that we most certainly are in a two-horse race.

There is a worrying trend growing within the technology sector. In the past few weeks governments around the world have been piling on the pressure for technology companies to hand over their trade secrets or risk losing out on business. The latest tech company to bow to the wills of government pressure is Kaspersky.

Understandably worried that it might lose US government contracts over allegations that it is working with the Russian government, founder Eugene Kaspersky has said that he is willing to turn over source code to prove that his security company is not a cover for Russian spies. He said he will do ‘anything’ to prove his company’s intensions, including testifying in front of Congress. “Anything I can do to prove that we don’t behave maliciously I will do it,” Kaspersky added.

While it might not be at the very top of the zeitgeist quite so much, today marks the one year anniversary of the launch of Pokémon Go – the Nintendo-licenced augmented reality game that took the world (and the streets) by storm. You'll likely hear occasional chatter about it now or see the odd person playing it out and about, but it's easy to forget just how big it was. Just a few days after launch, the game had a reported 45 million daily users and by the end of July it had become the fastest growing, most popular and most remunerative mobile game of all time.

Alarm bells are ringing and red flags are being waved as technology-related share prices have taken a tumble. Stock markets across Europe, Asia and the US continue to wobble as investors off-load ‘overvalued’ (their words, not mine) shares in technology companies around the world. Kicked off in the middle of June, the so called ‘big five’ US technology firms – Microsoft, Apple, Alphabet, Amazon and Facebook – lost around $100 billion on the New York stock exchange as investors dramatically turned their back on a hugely inflated market.

Women in tech are few and far between. That is the unfortunate reality. And those that are in the industry often find that they have to work twice as hard as their male counterparts just to be noticed. With the top positions at most tech companies filled by middle-aged white men, not a week goes by without a new report highlighting the gender pay gap within the industry. But, we are at least starting to talk about it.